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Linear birth-and-death processes (LBDPs) are foundational stochastic models in population dynamics, evolutionary biology, and hematopoiesis. Estimating parameters from discretely observed data is computationally demanding due to irregular…
We study the optimization landscape of a smooth nonconvex program arising from synchronization over the two-element group $\mathbf{Z}_2$, that is, recovering $z_1, \dots, z_n \in \{\pm 1\}$ from (noisy) relative measurements $R_{ij} \approx…
When recovering an unknown signal from noisy measurements, the computational difficulty of performing optimal Bayesian MMSE (minimum mean squared error) inference often necessitates the use of maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference, a special…
The Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) serves an important role in statistics and machine learning. In this article, for i.i.d. variables, we obtain constant-specified and sharp concentration inequalities and oracle inequalities for the MLE…
Latent class model (LCM), which is a finite mixture of different categorical distributions, is one of the most widely used models in statistics and machine learning fields. Because of its non-continuous nature and the flexibility in shape,…
In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in the development of so-called certifiable perception methods, which leverage semidefinite, convex relaxations to find global optima of perception problems in robotics. However, many of…
This paper introduces a simple efficient learning algorithms for general sequential decision making. The algorithm combines Optimism for exploration with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for model estimation, which is thus named OMLE. We prove…
We study the maximum smoothed likelihood estimator (MSLE) for interval censoring, case 2, in the so-called separated case. Characterizations in terms of convex duality conditions are given and strong consistency is proved. Moreover, we show…
A preference order or ranking aggregated from pairwise comparison data is commonly understood as a strict total order. However, in real-world scenarios, some items are intrinsically ambiguous in comparisons, which may very well be an…
This paper addresses the problem of mixed-membership estimation in networks, where the goal is to efficiently estimate the latent mixed-membership structure from the observed network. Recognizing the widespread availability and valuable…
The matrix normal model, i.e., the family of Gaussian matrix-variate distributions whose covariance matrices are the Kronecker product of two lower dimensional factors, is frequently used to model matrix-variate data. The tensor normal…
We consider finite element approximations of ill-posed elliptic problems with conditional stability. The notion of {\emph{optimal error estimates}} is defined including both convergence with respect to mesh parameter and perturbations in…
Variable selection is a fundamental task in statistical data analysis. Sparsity-inducing regularization methods are a popular class of methods that simultaneously perform variable selection and model estimation. The central problem is a…
Linear regression without correspondences concerns the recovery of a signal in the linear regression setting, where the correspondences between the observations and the linear functionals are unknown. The associated maximum likelihood…
The primary objective of this scholarly work is to develop two estimation procedures - maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and method of trimmed moments (MTM) - for the mean and variance of lognormal insurance payment severity data sets…
We study optimal estimation when the likelihood may be misspecified. Building on tools from the theory of decision-making under uncertainty, we analyze a class of axiomatically grounded optimality criteria which nests several existing…
The augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) is one of the most useful methods for constrained optimization. Its convergence has been well established under convexity assumptions or smoothness assumptions, or under both assumptions. ALM may…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
We introduce a new paradigm, $\textit{measure synchronization}$, for synchronizing graphs with measure-valued edges. We formulate this problem as maximization of the cycle-consistency in the space of probability measures over relative…
We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…